Things to do in London this weekend (September 24-25)

Serpentine North will host a major solo exhibition by Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar. The New Delhi-based artist is best known for his body of lyrical films, which move between documentary, travelogue and visual essay while exploring the legacies of decolonisation on the Indian subcontinent, incorporating the themes of violence, power, labour, indigenous rights, memory and censorship.

Bistro Sable is concerned solely with presenting a menu of Gallic classics, served in an unpretentious yet perfectly charming environment. Coqs get vin’d, pommes dauphinoised, boeuf is bourguinion’d and tartes tatin’d. This isn’t one of those new-fangled ‘spots’ you’ve been hearing about, with monoverbal dish descriptions, disaffected stick-and-poked servers and NTS-approved soundbeds. It’s a French restaurant, of the kind you’d be delighted to encounter while holidaying in provincial Occitania. Onion soup had the requisite meaty bread chunks bobbing below an unctuous cheesy lid. Chunky pâté en croûte was served with a tactically acute dollop of enlivening wholegrain mustard. Rotisserie chicken, luxuriating in sauce, served with pomme frites and fresh lettuce, was tanned, succulent throughout. Extreme Frenchness abounds.

Twentieth-century American playwright Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, from 1937, is a fine play with a somewhat on-the-nose consideration of art versus violence as embodied by protagonist Joe Bonaparte, a sensitive Italian-American violinist who throws himself into the world of boxing, with ultimately tragic results. This is a worthwhile revival: a crack cast meeting a bold vision that seeks to do more than just squeeze Golden Boy into standard naturalist tragedy shapes. Yates’ string-drenched production makes a virtue of Odets’ symbolism, and a tip-top cast sees it home. A historically important play, but this revival makes it feel thoroughly alive.

English artist Jenkin Van Zyl is known for his immersive installations that cast you into unsettling scenarios. Enclosure is set within a decaying facility where tourists could temporarily inhabit the lives of others. He’s created a whole world where people could renew or terminate their doubles and sees Mercy, a starlet who lent her likeness to the programme, arrive to terminate her contract, where the process begins to collapse. The work asks pertinent questions about the systems we create for ourselves and the human need for self-preservation. It’s a large-scale work where visitors move through ‘facility’, past fairground signage, holograms, inflatable cocoons and decaying ephemera. 

Bad Apples opens with the chirping of feathery creatures, but what follows is anything but birdsong. In this bleak comedy, Jonatan Etzler dreams up a nightmarish educational scenario: a teacher kidnapping a student on the eve of an Ofsted inspection. Absurdist plot twists follow, as well as an unexpected pivot into dark and unsettling terrain. It follows Maria (Saoirse Ronan), a downtrodden teacher trying her best to connect with her ten-year-old pupils. The satire here is nicely judged; the wry wit lands in unexpected ways. And Ronan is, as ever, the best thing here.

Once again, Regent’s Park will be taken over by sculptures this autumn to coincide with the Frieze art fair coming to London. While tickets to the fair can cost up to £250 and are usually reserved for the collectors, dealers and creators of the art world, Frieze Sculpture is totally free to visit and gives a chance to the proles to get a peak at some contemporary artworks in the open air. Fatoş Üstek will curate the exhibition for the fourth year in a row. This year, instead of viewing the sculptures in isolation, the display is curated as a web of interconnected objects, linked together with materials, stories and communities. Highlights will include Angel Otero’s threshold-like doorway descending beneath the grass, and Tarini Sethi’s intricate stainless-steel screens depicting utopian scenes. 

This musical version of Thelma & Louise has many things going for it, notably some thrilling songs from alt-country legend Neko Case, a great cast led by Amy Lennox and Rachel Turner, and some sparking dialogue from Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the classic 1991 Ridley Scott feminist road movie. The more we’re left alone with just the leads, the better it is: Tucker is very good as the sensible one with the traumatic past (Thelma); Amy Lennox is borderline sensational as the married one who loosens up, hits the bottle and gets laid on the road (Louise). And it gets extra good during the wilder, more concert-like sections at the start of each half. It’s a feelgood-ish comedy about female friendship (with some bold feminist undertones). 

Nominated for Best Newcomer at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards, Freddie Meredith’s Need a Light? is a by all accounts delightful hour of sketch comedy in which Meredith plays a nerdy, wannabe hip loser who spends 60 endearing minutes trying to start conversations with randoms in the smoking area of a club.

Returning for its fourth edition, the UK’s only festival celebrating cinema from Hong Kong arrives in cinemas around London this September, with 15 titles curated around the theme of ‘Diaspora As Agency’. We like the sound of Palimpsest: The Story of a Name 隱蹟之書：重寫自我’ an essayistic narrative in which director Mary Stephen searches for the meaning behind her family’s adoption of its Western surname. This opening night screening will be paired with an in-person Q&A with Stephen herself to kick off a rich programme of UK premieres, classic restorations and workshops.

Interested in dance music and club culture? AVA London, the mammoth electronic music and arts conference, is back in town for another jam-packed long weekend of masterclasses, talks, interviews, and workshops, with 70+ speakers across more than 30 sessions. Scheduled for the tail end of the festival season, the 2026 edition will feature a keynote from the Godfathers of Drum & Bass, Fabio & Grooverider, plus chats with the likes of Moby, ascendant French producer Oklou and Aussie electronic duo The Avalanches. It’s not just interesting discussions on the agenda. The day-to-night festival also features a stacked line-up of after-hours fun, with club nights at three of London’s best venues.

The September edition of Tate Modern’s ever-popular Friday Late series centres around the gallery’s critically acclaimed exhibition on 20th century Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, whose work explores the ancient traditions, displacement and humanity’s connection to the natural world. As always, you can expect a full programme of live music, DJs, workshops and talks, curated with involvement from some of London’s most interesting creators. Details will be announced soon. 

Londoners can get a taste of the Basque this September at a one-day food and drink festival celebrating Basque culture. Us Brits love a bar crawl, but this night promises a twist on the classic British pastime, with Basque tunes and pintxos – plus a free cider on entry if you book on Eventbrite. Pop-up ‘barstops’ make it possible to complete a crawl in just one location, and guests can vote for their favourite croqueta across the mini bars to win the title of People’s Champion. Plus, try txakoli, a dry white wine which is a favourite in the Basque.

Bougie shopping district, Marylebone Village is doing its best to bring some calm to W1 this September with its new Wellness Weekender, a free five-day health festival bringing together 15 health and wellbeing brands found across the neighbourhood. Visitors can get their hands on a bunch of freebies, including a 7-day gym membership at AMP, yoga workshops from Third Space and nutrition and fertility consultations, with waterproof accessory makers Sealskinz and athleisure brand Lululemon leading run clubs for the event. 

Bringing together a wide spectrum of voices from various disciplines of alternative East and South-East Asian creativity, Margins United is back for its third one-dayer this autumn. Created by Eastern Margins, a platform for alternative Asian culture in the UK, the day-to-night festival will feature a full takeover of the Club 360 in Tottenham, with tickets available for the day part, the night part or the whole thirteen-hour marathon if you can hack it. Headlining this year’s edition is South Korean singer Yves from K-pop girl group Loona. She’s joined by J-pop superstars F5ve, singer The Deep and British-Asian rapper Heroic Dragon for the daytime part of the festival, before a night-time line-up that features virally successful DJ and saxophonist Amanda Sze, Filipino producer DJ Love (Sherwin Tuna), audiovisual duo Tamanaramen and more. 

The NDCWales is out there doing some really interesting and unique stuff within contemporary dance. So lucky London, because they will be at Sadler’s Wells East for three nights this September. In the double bill they will perform ‘Ordinary Courage’ by Theo Clinkard, a moving and nuanced exploration of grief through dance. And somebody call Harry Styles, because the Olivier-nominated Alesandra Seutin, who’s also a Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist, has choreographed a new work inspired by running. ‘Untamed’ promises to be a visceral and athletic piece, accompanied by a soundtrack that includes traditional Welsh instruments and ancestral voices. 

Joe Kent-Waters’ two wildly acclaimed character comedy shows in the persona of horrifying working men’s club landlord Frankie Monroe (aka ‘Yorkshire’s Biggest Bastard’) were always telling two halves of the same story. And now they’ve been spliced into one presumably relatively seamless whole as Live!!! meets Dead!!! to tell the full story of Frankie’s Mephestopholean pact to save his club, subsequent descent to Hell, and eventual return. It should be quite tight – it’s 20 minutes shorter than both shows individually – but do expect it to be rambling and weird, in all the best ways.

Aardman’s creations don’t come much more wholesome (or west country) than Shaun the Sheep, the adorable ruminant who first popped up in A Close Shave and is now on his third – and funniest – big-screen outing. The Beast of Mossy Bottom has Shaun turning mad professor in full Young Frankenstein mode. The Farmer has unwittingly stomped all over the flock’s prized pumpkin patch, and Shaun has developed a quick-grow potion to return their veggies to their original state. One bottle-swap mix-up later and the Farmer is sprouting hairs in all directions and Mossingham has its own Bigfoot on the loose. There’s no dialogue but instead a delightful array of ‘mehehehehe!’s and ‘eeee-hhhh?’s. There’s a real genius to this kind of wordless storytelling. Aardman makes it look easy. 

Ever wanted to have a nosy around some of London’s coolest private buildings? Open House London gives guests free access to architectural wonders that are not normally open to the public – from schools and offices to places of worship. It’s an often rare chance to explore iconic or just interesting buildings that make up the capital’s storied history, while the programme usually includes tons of workshops, exhibitions and more, as well as the usual tours. This year, the full programme will be announced on July 15, with bookings opening on August 19. Get practising your clicking now – these tickets go faster than Glastonbury.

It’s rare that formidable French actress Juliette Binoche is fighting to match her two co-stars. But, so it is in American writer-director Lance Hammer’s London-set, moral maze of a dementia drama. Anna Calder-Marshall is Leslie, a woman with advanced dementia, and Tom Courtenay is Martin, her doting husband. Both embody their roles with subatomic nuance to drum up not just their present relationship, but a history that, like the rings on a mighty tree stump, has brought them to this moment. Social realism builds to a shocking third act, posing a final question: can the deeply human urge to see your waning loved one as they used to be, rather than as they are now, pose a danger past a certain point in this brutal illness? There are no easy answers in this raw but deeply empathetic film.  

Charge the steins! You don’t have to travel all the way to Germany for a lederhosen-clad knees-up this Oktoberfest – and you don’t even have to wait until October. Munich’s world-famous beer festival is very much on in London and the celebrations begin in September with big steins of beer, platters of excessively long wurst and loud oompah bands blowing brass like they don’t give a schnitzel. Oktoberfest began over 200 years ago, as a mammoth wedding party for a Bavarian prince and princess. It turned out that beer, bratwurst and all-round silliness were a match made in heaven, so now it's an annual excuse for everyone to cut loose as autumn approaches. Whether you’re after a traditional take on the event or drag queen-led partying, authentic Bavarian beers or east London craft IPAs, you can find the perfect Oktoberfest for you right here in London. You're sure to get a warm willkommen at one of these London Oktoberfest events. 

Polish artist Monika Sosnowska has made a career probing how architecture shapes us, outlives its purpose and bears witness to a changing city. The Weight of Matter, her first solo show at a London institution in more than 20 years, brings together 14 years of her work across the SLG’s two sites. Her fascination with cities in flux stems from her own experience. Coming of age as Poland’s communist regime collapsed in 1989, Sosnowska watched Warsaw transform as one political and economic order gave way to another. That upheaval became raw material for her sculpture. Steel, concrete, rebar, staircases, handrails and gates – the functional stuff of modernist architecture – are bent, buckled and twisted into strange new forms. The Weight of Matter is a reminder of the possibilities and joy that can come with a second life.

Any musical that wins five Tony awards and tempts the legendary Maria Friedman out of unofficial retirement is probably going to be alright, isn’t it? Well yes. In David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation, Friedman stars as Kimberly LeVaco, a 15-year-old New Jersey schoolgirl who suffers from an unnamed condition which makes her age at four times the usual speed. This inverted suburban Benjamin Button allows itself the one wild metaphysical flourish and plays it with a beautifully straight bat. It’s a rare gift of a role to a sixtysomething actor and Friedman absolutely seizes it in Michael Longhurst’s UK premiere.

The Bayeux Tapestry isn’t just a work of art: it is literal history, a near-1,000-year-old artefact that is also the primary source for our understanding of the most momentous year in the story of our own country. Woven in England, displayed in Bayeux, Normandy, the tapestry is now on display in the British Museum. Photos of a few key moments in your school textbooks may encompass its highlights, but they scarcely touch on it as art. Laid out flat in one continuous 70 metre strip, the Bayeux Tapestry is astonishing, a heady mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar that teeters somewhere between outsider art, medieval illumination, action cartoon, historical document and blithe propaganda. It’s extraordinary to see: sacred, profane, childish, profound, defining of our world but utterly unworldly.

Director and adapter Darren Raymond has put a decent spin on the 1664 comedy about faith, following in the vein of his similar remixes of Shakespeare plays in order to open classics up to new audiences. Here, a priest pretending piety once again inveigles his way into a devout family whose young scions are about to marry — and fleeces them. But Raymond adds a thick extra layer which deals with the culture clash of a Jamaican and a Nigerian family coming together in marriage. Raymond has fun with the idea. Mark Rylance is the rooking priest Pastor Blake. His performance is false teeth forward, all salivary, with comically raised eyebrows directed at the audience. He pulls on all the tricks that made him great at the Globe. In Raymond’s take you can see Pastor Blake as a vestige of a parochial and rapacious white England which swindles and steals from black communities. You can also just enjoy the false teeth. 

As the world around us has burned or flooded this summer, the environmental themes of Lucy Kirkwood’s pointedly allegorical drama The Children have only grown more relevant in the decade since it debuted – as Lyric Hammersmith artistic director Rachel O’Riordan’s anniversary revival production makes clear. Ex-nuclear physicists and long-married couple Hazel (Meera Syal) and Robin (Declan Conlon) are living on a remote part of the British coast, trying to eke out a life in the radioactive aftermath of a disaster at a nuclear facility they originally helped set up. When ex-colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) suddenly reappears, the fallout from their past has ramifications for the future. The actors conjure an effectively brittle and on-edge atmosphere as the nuclear plant looms – literally and symbolically – over them in the form of the enormous reactor tunnel of Gary McCann’s set. It feels powerfully real and urgent.

TOWIE meets Blasted by way of the Iliad in this breezily provocative fourth play from rising star playwright Ava Pickett. Bloodsport is both fresh but also pleasingly of a piece with Pickett’s other work. Like her previous plays, it’s set in Essex and takes place in the aftermath of a Trojan War of sorts, although there’s no Greece or Troy but rather some kind of civil unrest that’s gripped the UK. Smartly, Pickett never defines precisely what this is or exactly what has happened. New-ish Stratford East boss Lisa Spirling has left it a while to helm a play on her own stage, but her pacey, emphatic direction is spot on. And there are some tremendous performances. 

As You Like It is mostly a play about a large assortment of oddballs living in a forest for some reason. It definitely has a plot, but it also kind of plays out like an eccentric Tudor sketch show. While many productions get lost in the woods, dual directors Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine – plus their creative team headed by designer Paul Wills – are excellent guides through the trees. This is not a production that comes with a high concept, but by making every character as vivid as possible, visually and personality-wise, it’s just a great, boisterous production where you don’t find yourself questioning ‘and who is THAT guy?’ two hours in. From Lola Shalam’s highly strung romantic lead Rosalind and Grace Oddie-James as her amusingly laidback posh girl BFF Celia to co-director Josephine’s own turn as insecure wannabe geezer Orlando, all the way to Jonathan Broadbent’s scene-stealing Touchstone, it is simply very fun to spend some time in Wills’ whiteboard forest with these people. 

Man to Man, the wholesale rival of the Tilda Swinton-starring 1987 version of German playwright Manfred Karge’s monologue, sees the curtain lift to reveal Swinton leering away at us in whiteface, housecoat, Y-fronts and a shock of punky blonde hair. This isn’t one of her arch performance projects; it’s a proper play, in which she loses herself in a proper character. It’s a show that predates her celebrity, the Stephen Unwin-directed project dusted off by a creative team who are considerably older but still very much with us. In impressionistic style we’re led through the life of Ella, a German woman who takes on the identity of her dead husband Max so that she might keep earning in the interwar era. Standing on Bunny Christie’s wonderfully evocative set, she takes us on her journey of feral, almost rat-like survival through the 20th century. Swinton has so much energy and presence. There is absolutely zero question: she’s still got it.

Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying uses a blend of installation, video, photography, and sculpture to explore our complicated relationship with technology and how modern-day tech systems are reshaping the ways we live our lives – all with a humorous and surreal edge. See four of the artist’s imaginative, idiosyncratic and quietly provocative works at this free Haywood Gallery exhibition. A Life of Navigation includes Chihying’s early works commenting on our hectic urban lives, as well as two newly produced video installations commenting on artificial intelligence and gaming culture. 

The Royal Academy’s Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, is the first major exhibition devoted to the often overlooked Victorian artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing works like ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques and developed his lifelong fascination with fairies, creating magical, delicate, yet dark works crammed with naughty faces and gossamer dresses. Together, these works remind us that, although Dadd’s body was confined, his imagination never was.